


A Home Place

by DarlaBlack



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, F/M, On the Run, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-05
Updated: 2018-08-05
Packaged: 2019-06-22 10:47:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15580272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarlaBlack/pseuds/DarlaBlack
Summary: On the run in 2003, Mulder and Scully stop at a safehouse in the mountains.





	A Home Place

West Virginia  
2003

 

Road hums beneath them and behind them for a thousand miles in all directions and she thinks this car may finally be rumbling through its last miles. A cabin awaits some distance ahead, hidden on a turnoff from a mountain pass: steep, unpaved, secluded. It’s September, which means they will have two months, maybe. Three at most. Scully’s bare knee bounces in anticipation, poking out from her cutoff shorts. The air is sticky wet, hot and full of mosquitos and summerbugs in their final screeching and swarming days before they will be driven back into the earth by cold. Mulder places a hand over her knee to calm it; she hooks her fingers over his.

“Not far,” he says.

His voice is surprising after so many miles of wordless noise. She’d grown accustomed to the rattle of the engine, the crunch of gravel, air rushing through the open windows. Her eyes travel his profile and find worry in his eyes, concentration on his brow. His beard has grown in full, a modicum of disguise she has matched by browning her hair. These new versions of themselves have become familiar as the endless road and changing landscape. They are mostly nameless now. Rootless. Invisible soldiers scattered like twin tumbleweeds, pushed by the winds of a pursuit they haven’t caught glimpse of in months, but cannot trust to be gone.

Scully thinks back to a night she talked about stopping the car. She’d nudged him, pressed him about getting out and finding a life, which he brushed off with some feigned obliviousness. This  _is_  a life, he’d said. She thinks of making love on his couch, half-empty beer bottles and a handful of fish the only witnesses to their heartfelt cries of love into a pillow, into a muscled shoulder, while the credits of  _Caddyshack_  rolled into the deepening dark. She’d already been pregnant that night, though she hadn’t known, and the forking paths of their potential futures had never been so full to bursting as that lovesick evening. He’d tucked her naked against him and told her he was happy, that she made him happy, and she’d kissed his left nipple and told him she was happy too. It was a precipice, an apogee, a cusp overhanging a dark descent. She thinks of the steep, sorrowful plunge that followed, of screams into the desert and his body lowered into the cold ground, of the absolute bitter cruelty of their lives, and now, how those lives could yet be snatched from them at any moment.

They crest a small rise and the cabin appears beyond a copse of trees. Mulder squeezes her knee and looks at her, smiles.

“We’re home,” he says.

She tries to smile, but it feels flat on her lips. She’s not sure what the word means anymore,  _home_. They unload their few belongings, then the crates of cans and dry goods that will keep them alive until frost hardens the ground. By mid-December, descent in their limping Chevy will be impossible, and they’ll need to seek flatter, warmer ground. Georgia, he’d at first suggested while they lay curled against each other in some darkened motel in the Ozarks, then winced at her crestfallen face. He’d buried his head into her abdomen in apology, kissed her navel, gripped her hips while he’d whispered  _I’m sorry I’m sorry_  onto the soft skin of her belly. He was ashamed of how quickly he could forget her last trip through rural Georgia: first pregnant in a car, then bleeding and exhausted, helicoptered to safety with a squalling newborn in her arms. Another event he’d missed, another cruelty of absence in this time of ebbing hope.

And yet she seizes every moment she can, tells herself to be grateful for even the discomfort of long drives, the trickle of sweat down her back in their hot car, the stale-smoke smell of a cheap motel in Iowa—because he has come unburied from that cold ground, unhidden from his long months in exile, unimprisoned from his death sentence. They are more miracles than most ever get to know. She feels she should have no right to sorrow, and yet…

When they have unloaded the last crate, she drags her sweaty palms against her denim cutoffs and re-twists her longish hair into a sloppy bun. He curls a palm around the tank-top at her waist and pulls her to him, kisses her in the stale heat of the cabin. She raises onto her toes for a better reach, squeezes her body to his, swallows his mouth with her own— _this is life, this is life,_  she thinks. This is our life. She is kissing him for all she is worth, marking him, marking this spot in both geography and time. Yet there are tears forming in her eyes when he pulls back from her. A small furrow appears at his brow.

“It’s not so bad, is it?” he asks.

This earns him a sad smile. “No,” she says. “No, it’s perfect.”

The cabin is small but cozy. One bedroom, a fireplace, running water, a gas stove. There’s no phone, but a small satellite dish on the roof keeps them connected to the outside world. There’s a couch for them to curl up on, a wall of books and VHS tapes, a tiny clawfoot tub (“For you,” he says into her hair, forearm wrapped around her from behind and tucked under her breasts). And they have each other. They’ve pulled over. They’ve stopped the engine, if only for a time. This is not a home, not really, but it is a place to breathe. She kisses him again, then slides from his grasp.

When they’ve showered off the road dust and eaten, they find their way to the cabin’s small porch where they watch first the sun setting over Appalachia, and then the blackening night. From the dusk emerges a sea of stars, a gibbous moon. Mulder’s gaze is lost in the silvering sky. Scully studies his face in starlight, her leg across his lap on the hard wicker loveseat.

“What would you wish for, Scully?” he asks without looking at her. It is a dangerous question, loaded with too many obvious answers. Freedom from alien colonization. The safety to return home. William. Mostly William. The name thumps in her chest with every heartbeat, all day, always, unspoken. It hovers over them like a thickening cloud. But she can tell from his tone he wants some whimsical answer: Champaign and a five-star hotel, a better car, a puppy.

She opens her mouth with some glib answer, but surprises herself with what comes out instead. “I want to die first,” she says. “When the time comes, I mean. Whenever that is, whatever this path leads us to. I want to go first.”

She watches his Adam’s apple bob as he swallows back surprise. He shakes his head. “What?” He turns to her then, and his face falls into shadow.

“It’s a completely selfish wish,” she says. “I’m sorry. But I can’t… I couldn’t possibly do it again. I won’t.”

She feels him thinking, feels him understanding the weight of what she’s just said. He pulls her all the way onto his lap, bends to rest his forehead against her sternum, shakes his head. His arms come heavy around her back, holding her to him. “I’m not going anywhere without you. You’re not going anywhere.”

“Not now,” she says. “Someday.”

There is a long, heavy silence between them as his mind travels dark paths into their future.

She halts his journeys with her words, trying to lessen the tension. “So, what, we’ll go out together? Some blaze of glory?” her lips have fallen against his hair, her hands across the back of his worn t-shirt. She remembers a very strange Christmas Eve, half a decade ago, holding guns at each other in a mirage of bloodstains and lamplight, him swearing that he wouldn’t let her go without him. He nods against her chest.

“Like Thelma and Louise.” His voice is a deep rumble, muffled against her shirt.

This earns him a chuckle, and he lifts his head to look at her, brushes a few wild strands of hair away from her forehead. Nearly eye-to-eye, their gazes strain against the darkness for each other. A chorus of night-insects howls behind them.

“I won’t let you be alone again,” he says. She holds his eyes, deadly serious.

“Promise?”

He nods and lowers his lips to hers. In her mind, she stamps this place as a home, one of many, marks it in her memory map as a place of hope, rather than despair.  _Here is where he promised not to leave me_ , she thinks.

It is enough. For tonight, for many months that follow, for a decade, even—it is enough.


End file.
